Monday, May 20, 2019

Back in 2017, Taiwan's highest court ruled that violated “the people’s freedom of marriage” and “the people’s right to equality”, and gave the legislature to enact a marriage equality law. And over the weekend, just one week before the deadline expired, they finally did it:

Taiwan has legalised same-sex marriage, the first of any Asian state, with the passage of legislation giving gay couples the right to marry.

Lawmakers on Friday comfortably passed part of a bill that would allow gay couples to enter into “exclusive permanent unions” and apply for marriage registration with government agencies.

Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, who campaigned on a platform of marriage equality, tweeted after the vote: “We took a big step towards true equality, and made Taiwan a better country.”

The government had a gun to its head, in that if they hadn't legislated, a court order would have come into effect allowing same-sex marriage. And while the current president supports equality, in the interim they have had a bigot referendum which sought to restrict marriage rights and permanently exclude gay couples. The law tries to dance a line between the court order and the referendum. Whether it manages that successfully will I guess be decided by the courts.